Monthly Archives: August 2006

Paul goes to the country (and some asp.net 2.0, too!)

dotNET

Paul Litwin, an INETA speaker, came all the way from Seattle to Vermont to speak at Vermont.NET. Rather than fly in the day of the meeting and out the next morning, Paul arrived on Saturday night in order to enjoy being in Vermont for a few days. Unfortunately, shortly before his trip he agreed to do a project that kept him in front of the computer a good part of the time, but we still managed to get him out to a walk around our neighbor’s mountain farm, visit our favorite swimming pond, meet his first brushhog and even go Chanterelle picking (I don’t mind divulging my secret Chanterelle spots to someone who lives 3000 miles away) and visit a local sugarhouse (Purinton’s) to buy some maple syrup.

Last night was our user group meeting and after local developer, Rob Hale (from G.E.Health Care), did a short talk on the Strategy Pattern, Paul shared with us some of the many tricks he had to figure out for his own work when using the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls. I find that the things I struggle with make good fodder for presentations, so I love this kind of talk. Rather than just diving into the tricks with an assumption that everyone was familiar with the ins and outs  of the new controls, he went through them first. I have not played iwth them a lot so even in the beginner part of the sessio, I learned plenty. The tips & tricks will definitely come in handy and I’m glad that someone else has already done the heavy lifting for me on this stuff! Paul will be doing this talk at ASP.NET Connections in the fall, although without the benefit of the extra time we get when presenting at a user group.

After the meeting, we brought Paul to downtown Burlington to sample some more of the local beer (we had already had dinner at brew pubs on Saturday and Sunday night) and then somehow finished up the night at Ben & Jerry’s. The amusing part of this was that the other woman who came along, web developer Gail Guy (who was also the lucky winner of the FarPoint Spread for Web license we raffled off…the Genom-E Express license went to Roger Gillim from the Vermont Dept. of Health) and I started talking about programming and the guys all rolled their eyes and moved to the other end of the table.

Paul found the secret to being the perfect guest at our house – being kind and loving to our old Newfoundland dogs, Tasha & Daisy. Thanks Paul!

Sudden Das Blog 1.8 error – look familiar to anyone??

Blogging

DasBlog is an open source project, so I need to be patient while waiting for a response to my query on the forums. In the meantime, perhaps someone else has experienced this and knows the cause and resolution.

Since Sunday, my blog has been throwing a wierd error that is causing the events log to bloat to 12 or more megs. My datafarm.com sites are in trouble. My webhost had to restart IIS on the web server.

Below is an example of the error. The errors cite different macros, but the rest is always the same. I have gone back to the default Blog Template, but the problem is still there. I recopied the DLL’s, but the problem continues.

So, a plea for help if anyone out there has experienced this. It happened suddenly with no changes to the site. I’ve seen two other unanswered questions about this error in the dasblog forums.

Here is what the error looks like:

l2 time 2006-08-14T15:28:11 code 1 message <span>Error:<br/>Error executing macro: bodytext. Make sure it you’re calling it in your BlogTemplate with paratheses like ‘myMacro()’. Macros with parameter lists and overloads must be called in this way. Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> System.Threading.ThreadAbortException: Thread was being aborted.
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 118
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 61
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.SharedBasePage.ProcessDayTemplate(DateTime day, Control ContentPlaceHolder) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\SharedBasePage.cs:line 744
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Macros.get_Bodytext() in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\Macros.cs:line 1233
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean isBinderDefault, Assembly caller, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
at System.Reflection.RuntimePropertyInfo.GetValue(Object obj, Object[] index)
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.InvokeMacro(Object obj, String expression) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 332
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 105<br/> while processing .</span>

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont.NET Monday Night (Aug 14th)- INETA Sponsored Meeting

Vermont

We are lucky to have INETA Speaker Paul Litwin coming from Seattle to present on the ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls (Tips & Tricks) on Monday night!

In addition to INETA flying Paul here, they pay for the pizza & soda at the meeting, which is always appreciated!

AND, that’s not all folks! 🙂  INETA sent out their SWAG mailing earlier ths summer and I’m still pulling treats out of it. This month I will be raffling off

If you plan on attending, go to the site and rsvp (this way we know how much pizza and soda to bring).

There are lots of new discounts on the member page of the website.

Meeting details and directions at www.vtdotnet.org.

Eeeek! Snake in the compost bin

Purely Personal

I thought I would take a little break from the computer on this nice sunny day, so I did something that I’ve been giving lip service to for two years. I raked up a big pile of grass cuttings from the latest lawn mowing to put in the compost bin. We’ve been throwing food stuff in there for 3 years but never anything else. So it never “cooks” (breaks down and turns into black gold). I have never even stirred it up. The grass cuttings do add some needed ingredients to get the compost cooking.

Now I’ve always been careful when opening the lid of the bin because when we moved here, the *very* first time I went out there (hmmm, early August, come to think of it, just like today) there was a snake hangng out on top of all of the stuff (left by the former owners (not the snake, the stuff!)). I have added to it once or twice a week all year round for three years since then and have never seen another one. Today, rather than carefully sliiiiiiiiding the lid just a bit to expose enough space for me to put my little compostable cornstarch bag of kitchen compost in, I just flipped the lid off onto the ground and of course – SNAKE! Just a garden snake, but it was not one those little 1/4 inch diameter ones. It was more like 1  or 1 1/2 inches around.

Needless to say, after my girlie shriek and jumping back, I abandoned the lid, my bag of grass cuttings and my little pitchfork for when Rich gets home. In the meantime, I hope the poor snake recovers from the probable minor heart attack he had. There he was, resting in a nice dark place before all of this happened!

I’m not really afraid of snakes. In fact, a college friend had an Indian Python named Eve that I got friendly enough with to actually put around my shoulders a few times. It’s just the *surprise* snakes.

shiver…